The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
In the past we have explored how social media can be used to delineate earthquakes, study human-wildlife interactions, understand urban morphology, urban smells or locating wildfires among many other things. Keeping with …
Continue reading »Readers might of noticed that recently we have been exploring the use of street view images to explore cities or how we can utilize geosocial media to understand the form of function of cities, but one thing we have not explored is the role o…
Continue reading »As the AAG has just wrapped up I thought I would write brief (well actually quite long) post on the talks that I was involved with at the conference. These talks would not have been possible without the many great students and colleagues who I have bee…
Continue reading »This past week we attended the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting in Washington DC. At the AGU we presented two abstracts. The first follows on our work with respect to using synthetic populations within agent-based models. This work wa…
Continue reading »In the past we have explored various ways to explore vaccine hesitancy and keeping with this theme we have a new paper published in PLOS ONE entitled “Understanding the determinants of vaccine hesitancy in the United States: A comparison of social surv…
Continue reading »In the past on this site we have written about how one can use social media to study the world around us. Often the focus has been on Twitter but that is not the only social media platform available. Another is Flickr, and while in past posts hav…
Continue reading »At the upcoming International Conference on Geographic Information Science (GIScience 2023) Boyu Wang and myself have a new paper entitled “Agent-Based Modeling of Consumer Choice by Utilizing Crowdsourced Data and Deep Learning.” In the paper we explo…
Continue reading »Continuing our work on social media and vaccinations, Qingqing Chen, Arie Croitoru, and myself have a new paper entitled “A comparison between online social media discussions and vaccination rates: A tale of four vaccines” published in DIGITAL HE…
Continue reading »Continuing our work on social media and vaccinations, Qingqing Chen, Arie Croitoru, and myself have a new paper entitled “A comparison between online social media discussions and vaccination rates: A tale of four vaccines” published in DIGITAL HE…
Continue reading »It seems that its been a quite some time that we posted about geosocial analysis but in a recent paper with Fuzhen Yin and Li Yin entitled “Information Propagation on Cyber, Relational and Physical Spaces about Covid-19 Vaccine: Using Socia…
Continue reading »It seems that its been a quite some time that we posted about geosocial analysis but in a recent paper with Fuzhen Yin and Li Yin entitled “Information Propagation on Cyber, Relational and Physical Spaces about Covid-19 Vaccine: Using Socia…
Continue reading »In the past we have written about how vaccination is discussed on social media but such studies were often just focused on short study periods (i.e. a month). However, with the current COVID-19 pandemic we thought we would revisit the vaccination …
Continue reading »In the past we have written about how vaccination is discussed on social media but such studies were often just focused on short study periods (i.e. a month). However, with the current COVID-19 pandemic we thought we would revisit the vaccination …
Continue reading »Continuing our work on Emojis, at the forthcoming International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling and Prediction and Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation (or SBP-BRiMS for short) we (Melanie Swartz, Arie Croit…
Continue reading »Continuing our work on Emojis, at the forthcoming International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling and Prediction and Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation (or SBP-BRiMS for short) we (Melanie Swartz, Arie Croit…
Continue reading »Building upon our work on volunteered geographical information (VGI) and ambient geographic information (AGI) and how such data (e.g. social media) can be used to understand place, Xiaoyi Yuan, Andreas Züfle and myself have a new paper entitled: “A Th…
Continue reading »Building upon our work on volunteered geographical information (VGI) and ambient geographic information (AGI) and how such data (e.g. social media) can be used to understand place, Xiaoyi Yuan, Andreas Züfle and myself have a new paper entitled: “A Th…
Continue reading »In most of our work to date with respect to exploring social media, we have only looked at the text or images from online social media platforms (e.g. Twitter and Flickr) and excluded emojis from the analysis. However, this has now changed with a…
Continue reading »In most of our work to date with respect to exploring social media, we have only looked at the text or images from online social media platforms (e.g. Twitter and Flickr) and excluded emojis from the analysis. However, this has now changed with a…
Continue reading »In most of our work to date with respect to exploring social media, we have only looked at the text or images from online social media platforms (e.g. Twitter and Flickr) and excluded emojis from the analysis. However, this has now changed with a…
Continue reading »In the past we have explored how social media can be used to delineate earthquakes, locate wildfires or be used to understand urban morphology. However, recently we have also started to explore how social media and crowdsourced data can be utilized to …
Continue reading »In the past we have explored how social media can be used to delineate earthquakes, locate wildfires or be used to understand urban morphology. However, recently we have also started to explore how social media and crowdsourced data can be utilized to …
Continue reading »Building upon our work with respect to how bots impact online conversations pertaining to global events and health, we have extended this research to see what role bots play in mass shooting events. In our new paper published in Palgrave Co…
Continue reading »Building upon our work with respect to how bots impact online conversations pertaining to global events and health, we have extended this research to see what role bots play in mass shooting events. In our new paper published in Palgrave Co…
Continue reading »In the past we have written about how one can use crowdsourced data to gain a collective sense of place from Twitter contributions and also from corresponding Wikipedia entries (e.g. here). In a new paper with Xiaoyi Yuan, we extend this work to explo…
Continue reading »In the past we have written about how one can use crowdsourced data to gain a collective sense of place from Twitter contributions and also from corresponding Wikipedia entries (e.g. here). In a new paper with Xiaoyi Yuan, we extend this work to explo…
Continue reading »Following on from our work on bots and health discussions in relation to online social networks (OSNs), Xiaoyi Yuan, Ross Schuchard and myself have just published a paper entitled “Examining Emergent Communities and Detecting Social Bots within the Pol…
Continue reading »SES diagram with examples of topics thathave been researched using social media dataWhile I have written about how one can use social media data to study cities, health issues etc… more recently we have been looking into how such data can be used to …
Continue reading »SES diagram with examples of topics thathave been researched using social media dataWhile I have written about how one can use social media data to study cities, health issues etc… more recently we have been looking into how such data can be used to …
Continue reading »Figure 1: Relation of computational social science of disasters (CSSD) with other fields.Past posts have discussed or demonstrated how computational social science (CSS) (i.e. the study of social science through computational methods) can be uti…
Continue reading »Figure 1: Relation of computational social science of disasters (CSSD) with other fields.Past posts have discussed or demonstrated how computational social science (CSS) (i.e. the study of social science through computational methods) can be uti…
Continue reading »Recently our research has started to dig deeper into social media, especially how bots diffuse information in online social networks (OSNs). To this end at the 7th International Conference on Complex Networks and Their Applications we had a paper…
Continue reading »Recently our research has started to dig deeper into social media, especially how bots diffuse information in online social networks (OSNs). To this end at the 7th International Conference on Complex Networks and Their Applications we had a paper…
Continue reading »Readers of the blog might know we have an interest in volunteered geographic information, social media and Web 2.0 technologies and how they can be used to explore urban systems. Recently however, we turned our focus on how such information and technol…
Continue reading »Readers of the blog might know we have an interest in volunteered geographic information, social media and Web 2.0 technologies and how they can be used to explore urban systems. Recently however, we turned our focus on how such information and technol…
Continue reading »
Continuing on our work of exploring health related issues in social media, Xiaoyi Yuan and myself had a paper accepted at the 9th International Conference on Social Media and Society. In our paper entitled: “Examining Online Vaccination Discussion and …
Continue reading »
Continuing on our work of exploring health related issues in social media, Xiaoyi Yuan and myself had a paper accepted at the 9th International Conference on Social Media and Society. In our paper entitled: “Examining Online Vaccination Discussion and …
Continue reading »Continuing on our work of exploring health related issues in social media, Xiaoyi Yuan and myself had a paper accepted at the 9th International Conference on Social Media and Society. In our paper entitled: “Examining Online Vaccination Discussion and …
Continue reading »
Abstract:
Social media are often heralded as offering cancer campaigns new opportunities to reach the public. However, these campaigns may not be equally successful, depending on the nature of the campaign itself, the type of cancer being addressed, and the social media platform being examined. This study is the first to compare social media activity on Twitter and Instagram across three time periods: #WorldCancerDay in February, the annual month-long campaigns of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month (NBCAM) in October and Movember in November, and during the full year outside of these campaigns. Our results suggest that women’s reproductive cancers – especially breast cancer – tend to outperform men’s reproductive cancer – especially prostate cancer – across campaigns and social media platforms. Twitter overall generates substantially more activity than Instagram for both cancer campaigns, suggesting Instagram may be an untapped resource. However, the messaging for both campaigns tends to focus on awareness and support rather than on concrete actions and behaviors. We suggest health communication efforts need to focus on effective messaging and building engaged communities for cancer communication across social media platforms.
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| A comparison of percentages of cancer cases (green bars) and references to corresponding cancers in Twitter (blue bar) and Instagram (orange bar) during World Cancer Day 2016. |
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| References to breast cancer (green line), prostate cancer (orange line), and Movember (blue line) over the full year 2015 in Instagram. |
Full Reference:
Vraga, E., Stefanidis, A., Lamprianidis, G., Croitoru, A., Crooks, A.T. Delamater, P.L., Pfoser, D., Radzikowski, J. and Jacobsen, K.H. (2018), Cancer and Social Media: A Comparison of Traffic about Breast Cancer, Prostate Cancer, and Other Reproductive Cancers on Twitter and Instagram, Journal of Health Communication. 3(2), 181-189. (pdf)
Abstract:
Social media are often heralded as offering cancer campaigns new opportunities to reach the public. However, these campaigns may not be equally successful, depending on the nature of the campaign itself, the type of cancer being addressed, and the social media platform being examined. This study is the first to compare social media activity on Twitter and Instagram across three time periods: #WorldCancerDay in February, the annual month-long campaigns of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month (NBCAM) in October and Movember in November, and during the full year outside of these campaigns. Our results suggest that women’s reproductive cancers – especially breast cancer – tend to outperform men’s reproductive cancer – especially prostate cancer – across campaigns and social media platforms. Twitter overall generates substantially more activity than Instagram for both cancer campaigns, suggesting Instagram may be an untapped resource. However, the messaging for both campaigns tends to focus on awareness and support rather than on concrete actions and behaviors. We suggest health communication efforts need to focus on effective messaging and building engaged communities for cancer communication across social media platforms.
|
| A comparison of percentages of cancer cases (green bars) and references to corresponding cancers in Twitter (blue bar) and Instagram (orange bar) during World Cancer Day 2016. |
|
| References to breast cancer (green line), prostate cancer (orange line), and Movember (blue line) over the full year 2015 in Instagram. |
Full Reference:
Vraga, E., Stefanidis, A., Lamprianidis, G., Croitoru, A., Crooks, A.T. Delamater, P.L., Pfoser, D., Radzikowski, J. and Jacobsen, K.H. (2018), Cancer and Social Media: A Comparison of Traffic about Breast Cancer, Prostate Cancer, and Other Reproductive Cancers on Twitter and Instagram, Journal of Health Communication. 3(2), 181-189. (pdf)